Napoleon Bonaparte and Enzo Ferrari are being accused of cultural appropriation. Not the actual people, but the movies about them, Ridley Scott's Napoleon and Michael Mann's Ferrari, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
French and Italian critics believe the directors' decision to cast American actors Joaquin Phoenix and Adam Driver to play French and Italian icons is an insult. Even more of an insult? They speak English in the movies.
This is Napoleon from Puerto Rico…
An Italian reviewer wrote about Ferrari in the magazine Movieplayer, “It's an original sin. Not just to have them speak English, but with a dodgy Italian accent.”
French GQ said Phoenix's Napoleon and British Vanessa Kirby as Josephine were “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentional funny.”
Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino told The Telegraph that it's culture appropriation. According to Favino, Mann could have just as easily cast an Italian actor such as “Toni Servillo, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea” to play Ferrari.
“If a Cuban can't be a Mexican, why can an American be an Italian? [It] seems an attitude of contempt,” he explained.
As it turns out, there's a name for this phenomenon: Hollywood historization. THR explains it as “taking a famous foreign figure from the past and getting an A-list to play them in English.” It has a long and Academy Award-winning tradition as well from 1960's Spartacus (who was Thracian but played by American Kirk Douglas, who was of Russian descent) to Scott's Gladiator Hispano-Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius played by the Australian Russell Crowe.
and Ferrari from California
It's a little difficult for me to be sympathetic to the issue of cultural appropriation. I'm Asian. This article is going to be much longer than intended if I begin to write down the many instances white people have played roles on screen of characters that were supposedly Asian.
But I think it's best said by French film critic Yal Sadat of Cahiers du cinéma, “here you have a bunch of white dudes playing other white dudes.” Yes, in my head I heard it said in Robert Downey Jr.'s voice as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder… which opens a whole ‘nother can of worms when it comes to the appropriateness or not of appropriation.
Back to French, Italians and Americans, the white dudes.
“Joaquin Phoenix as an English-speaking Napoleon doesn’t offend me,” Sadat explained.
“But there is a sense of cultural superiority [to these films]. The idea that we still need big Hollywood to tell us our history is important,” he added.
However, it might not be an issue to French and Italian audiences. They will be watching the movies in dubbed versions. Napoleon has earned $5 million in France, and Ferrari, which will open in Italy on Dec. 14, is expected to earn just as much (or maybe even more).
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